RED ROCKET'S GLARE

The early Space Race was basically just two bald-headed old dicks—one American, one Soviet—waving their rockets at each other across the world's biggest backyard fence. And like any good pissing contest, it had casualties. Officially, the Soviets never lost a man in space. *Officially*. But unofficially, their early program had more holes than a Swiss cheese orgy at the Vatican. Which brings us to Major Grigori “Big G” Belov. Spring of '63, maybe '64? Who knows. Kremlin records from that era read like a a bad cokehead's diary. Point is, Grigori goes up in his Vostok-adjacent tin can, waves to Khrushchev on the little TV, and promptly vanishes from orbit. The official story was “technical difficulties,” which is Soviet for “the fucking thing blew up, we lost him, and if you tell anyone we'll introduce your spleen to a Siberian ice pick.” But it didn't blow up. Oh no. That would’ve been too simple.

Grigori's de-orbit was less a “controlled descent” and more a “fiery seven-minute panic attack.” He came screaming through the atmosphere way, *way* off course, finally splashing down not in the welcoming arms of Mother Russia but in the mangrove-choked swamp of a place we'll call “Crotch Island” because its real name is unpronounceable and probably means something like “The Land of Insatiable Wicker.” This little patch of forgotten paradise, somewhere in the ass-end of the Pacific, had somehow missed the boat on colonialism, missionary work, and pants. The locals, a cheerful and suspiciously well-endowed people, had never seen metal, let alone a sweating, swearing man sealed inside a ten-foot tall ballistic suppository.

When they finally pried Grigori out of his capsule, they didn't treat him like a god. They treated him like a *delivery*. See, the locals’ religion revolved around a mythical figure called the “Great Plumber,” who would one day descend from the sky in a “Seed of the Sky” to, and I'm quoting from the (probably fabricated) journals of Sir Reginald Wank-Piston, “unclog the cosmic pipes of our women and introduce our men to a truly heroic form of fraternal bonding.” Grigori, pale, hairy, and still wearing his bulky silver spacesuit, was the spitting image of their prophetic drawings. He tried to explain the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels; they just nodded enthusiastically and presented him with the tribal chieftain's three buxom daughters and two extremely friendly sons. His space helmet was immediately repurposed into a communal spank-bank.

Did Grigori ever make it home? Fuck no. The last the outside world ever heard of him was a garbled radio transmission picked up by a listening post in Alaska that just repeated the phrase “so many... so willing...” followed by what sounded like a conch shell being blown in a truly obscene way. The Soviets scrubbed his name from every record, snipped him out of group photos, and told his wife he'd died heroically testing a new brand of state-approved vodka. But somewhere out there, on an island that cartographers forgot, the lineage of “Big G” Belov lives on. Anthropologists in the ‘90s were baffled to discover a tribe of red-headed Polynesians whose sacred chants sounded suspiciously like sea shanties about the means of production, and whose primary religious icon was a hammered-metal pecker wearing a tiny, tiny cosmonaut helmet. Some legacies are written in the stars; others are just scrawled on a banana leaf with dick-juice.